19
Evie
We sit in a corner booth at the café, and everyone else gives us space in a way that makes me feel like we’re already a couple. Oliver orders a glass of iced water as well as a hot drink, so he can hold it against the bruises on his eye.
“Are you going to tell me about that?” I ask. I’m dying to know how the story involves me, and have spent the last hour carried away with the delicious notion that maybe he’s been fighting off admirers I didn’t know I had.
“Well, everyone was talking about you at school after photography last week.”
Not in a good way, I bet.
“And you know your friend from the party?” he continued.
“Breanna?”
“Those two guys in the fight were talking about having seen her on a website.” He looks at me cautiously, as if he’s testing how much I know.
My heart thuds through the floor. How much I know should be obvious from the way the mention of the site makes my hands tremble in some mashup of panic, fear, and molten anger. They were talking about her? I feel sick, and scared, andhelpless that I still haven’t found a way around the problem that chipped away all the most confident parts of her.
“When I saw you at the party and realized you were friends,” Oliver says, leaning closer, “the exhibition theme made sense. You want to avenge for the wrong done to your best friend.” He’s speaking like a knight of the Round Table, which is doing all kinds of things to my insides, but yes. YES. “This is what matters to you most?” he guesses.
“I just want to erase this whole chapter. But I don’t know how to fix it without landing her in trouble too. She was fifteen. The photos were illegal, even on her own phone.”
He listens calmly to every word. It’s the first real conversation I’ve been able to have about it with anyone but Bree.
“Is this from that fight?” I ask, my fingers hovering carefully near his injured face. I lean closer this time, and get a better view of the shiny, bruised skin around his eye and cheekbone and at him. My crush is galloping out of control.
“Evie, this is because I found out who was responsible for the She Loves It site,” he says quietly.
My insides heave, and I instantly imagine blue and red lights flashing at Bree’s front door. “Are you going to report them?”
She can’t be dragged through this. The whole thing is a giant, murky mess reliant on fear and silence to keep it hidden, and suddenly I’m terrified it’s all going to blow up.
“It’s gone,” Oliver says simply.
Gone? How?
I grab my phone, type the address, and instead of recoiling at images that make me shake with rage, I get a business page saying the domain name is available. Then I look back at him, and at his black eye.
“You got the domain deregistered?” I say.
“It’s just an email to the support team,” he explains.
An email he made someone send under duress, by the look of it. And I realize what he’s done, that he’s done it for Breanna,because she is my friend.
Everything is blurry through tears of relief for her. And gratitude for him. The risk he’s taken, not just physically, but in going against culture. “I don’t know what to say,” I whisper.
“Don’t be too impressed,” he says, hanging his head. “I should have done it months ago—I knew about the website.” He looks back at me, guilty. “But it wasn’t personal then, Evie.”
His words are so loaded my mind can barely grasp hold of them. “I don’t want to make a big thing about it, okay?” he follows up. “I wish I’d stepped in before.”
So now he’s heroicandhumble and honest about his missteps and he’s confiding in me about rushing in and saving my best friend from an impossible situation and being beaten up in the process …And it’s personal.
“Can I just text Bree?” I ask him.
He nods, and I pick up my phone, ready to type two words that feel spun with gold:It’s over.I attach a screenshot of the domain page, and, as the phone whooshes with the sent message, my eyes return to Oliver’s. She doesn’t know it, but she is eternally in this boy’s debt. And by extension, given just how much I love her, so am I.
Thursday afternoon, Oliver meets me at the library because I have an English essay to write about Shakespeare and it’s his best subject. It’s my best subject too, and I don’t actually need any help, but sitting across from him in the study area, comingup with points about Shakespeare’s use of rhetoric inKing Henry IV, is just about the most romantic thing that has ever happened in my time on this planet.
